It's not easy to assess the number of patients that a doctor sees in a day because they're not all equal. For people who have a sore neck or suffer from a minor knee problem, it's relatively easy. For those who have diabetes or recurring cancer, treatment is much longer.
We can talk about means. In that respect, matters are not completely equal from base to base. At the start of the reform, we determined that there would be 1,500 persons per health care unit. That's a somewhat arbitrary figure.
I'll switch to English.
It was a little arbitrary, and the Auditor General has remarked on that. We know that 1,500 people in a very busy base like St. Jean produce more work than 1,500 people in a relatively quiet base like perhaps Greenwood. We also know that 1,500 fifty-year-old officers in Ottawa produce more work than either of those. So you have to look at the demographics of the base.
We also know that our system of compensating--particularly our contracted physicians--is very inefficient because they're on per diem rates. If you want to run a health care system at the lowest possible cost, you do not pay people per diems. But we're not interested in running assembly-line medicine either. I'm not going to come out with a policy that says you have to see 100 patients a day, because I'm going to get crap. Excuse me. I'm going to get not very good--